Because You Were STILL Home

2008's The Strangers remains a minor gem of its error. Nicely shot and surprisingly bleak, it worked on its own terms. For whatever reason, it's taken a good decade for a followup. Let's see if the wait was worth it.

Quick Plot: After about five minutes worth of production company logos, we visit a quiet, nearly empty mobile home encampment. An older couple is sleeping with their apparently deaf and cute but incredibly useless dog when a stranger knocks on the door. Bad things happen. To everyone BUT the dog.

A few hundreds of miles a way, a downtrodden family of four makes their way towards our recent victims. Mom Cindy (the always lovely Christina Hendricks) and dad Mike are trying to give their rebellious teenage daughter Kinsey a new start at a boarding school. Better adjusted big brother Luke is along for the ride. 

Before the family has had time to settle in for the night, the trio of stab-happy killers who terrorized Liv Tyler a decade ago are back, masks in place and sharp objects in hand. What follows is a lot of stalking, some awful driving, and a bevy of terrible decisions made by frantic prey.

Filling in for The Strangers’ director Bryan Bertino is Johannes Roberts, he of 47 Meters Down. Like the first film, Prey At Night has a better cast than you might often find in your run-of-the-mill slasher. While we don’t get Arthur Miller levels of family drama, Ben Ketai’s script helps to flesh out our characters well enough that the stakes are felt. Cindy and Mike are a tired but loving couple feeling frustrated at the path their daughter is going down, while Kinsey gets actual moments of growth over the course of one horrible night in recognizing what a bratty teenager she’s been. There’s also something touching about how Luke deals with the situation, being a genuinely nice kid who’s not quite at the kind of place where he can pull the trigger on another human being.

I liked The Strangers well enough, and have similar feelings on its sequel. The simple design of the killers is visually interesting. I cared enough about the characters to be invested in their plight, even if I occasionally wanted to reach into the screen to wring the neck of seemingly capable people making mistake after mistake. 

High Points

As far as settings go, an empty trailer park goes a long way. Rob makes great use out of the cheapness of the interiors, showing just how easy it is for a strong hunter to break through walls. Equally effective is the use of a swimming pool and its tacky neon lighting

Low Points

Seriously, you're being chased on foot by a mad man in a truck: WHY DO YOU INSIST ON RUNNING ON THE ROAD WHEN THERE ARE TREES AND WATER AND OTHER NON-DRIVE-ABLE SURFACES ALL ABOUT?!

Lessons Learned

In slasher situations, don’t even bother calling the police. They’ll send one yokel with no spacial awareness who will inevitably be gutted before he even has the chance to tell a screaming woman to calm down

Deny a little sister her chance on the baseball field and she will take that anger and turn it into something truly powerful

For goodness sake, when being chased, already remember a simple tip: Serpentine! Serpentine!

Look! It’s—

Bailee Madison, probably better known as the grouchy little girl in Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark and as Clementine the elf in a set of Hallmark Christmas movies, but will forever to me be a key guest star in one of the greatest Law & Order: SVU episodes to ever feature a deranged Joan Cusack giving nose jobs to a 7-year-old

Also, DOUBLE LOOK! It’s—

Three key members of Night of the Living Podcast, enjoying a bite as extras

Rent/Bury/Buy

Prey At Night is a worthy sequel to The Strangers. Much like the first film, it doesn't break any ground, but works for how it narrows its focus on a small but sympathetic group of soon-to-be victims while terrorizing them with scary stabbings and odd but effective style choices. It's a rainy day rental.

Let the Sunshine In. Then Die.

Daylight Savings is a cruel calendar trick and a reason to distrust farmers, but we can be thankful for  one thing: sunshine. Bright, warm, orange hued illumination a whole 60 minutes ahead of schedule.

As I walked home this week and actually saw things, I started thinking about the effectiveness of daylight and its underuse in horror. Sure, there’s some primal fear and easy camera tricks to harvest in midnight cinema, but today, let’s take a look at films not afraid to let the sunshine in.

In rough chronological order:

1. The Wicker Man

Some of the earlier eeriness occurs in that sexy witching hour, when snails cuddle and Britt Ekland’s body double booty shakes, but Robin Hardy’s 1974 classic enigma truly comes to pagan life in its last terrifying act set during a beautiful fall early afternoon (well it starts in the morning, but those choral parades take forever). With the bright glare sometimes forcing you to look away, the film bypasses any of the tricks of night vision, letting all the weirdness of bunny masks, pancake makeup, and group singing hang out in full view. When (SPOILER ALERT) Sergeant Howie screams his final hymn from a blazing, goats a’fire filled sacrificial structure, the glory of the natural sun shines straight through to the audience.

2. I Spit On Your Grave

Brutal gang rape is horrifying any time of day, but this 1978 shocker is made all the worse by its fully lit cruelty. Filmmaker Meir Zarchi doesn't shy away from showing you the horrors experienced by lead Camille Keaton, filming her pale body with a matter-of-fact detachment that simply lets the crime speak for itself.

3. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

Spanning dusk to dawn, Tobe Hooper’s classic set the bar for all-out backwoods psychohorror. The introduction of Leatherface--silent, husky, and full of gutty grime--is shocking not just because of his untamed violence, but also due to the sudden appearance of such a grotesque human in full light. It’s fitting then that TCM ends on such a memorable, sun-lit shot as our chainsaw-wielding madman swings his roaring sword across a slowly waking Texas morning landscape.

4. Jaws

Quint’s account of the USS Indianapolis may be told in haunting shadow, but his lower half gets crunched on what may otherwise be a perfect July beach morning. 

5. The Brood

Generally, kindergarten days begin with the Pledge of Allegiance and one kid vomiting in the morning circle, but leave it to David Cronenberg to capture a different sort of start to alphabet games and adding practice. This 1979 chiller features many fine sequences, but it’s the schoolteacher slaughter that truly horrifies anybody with a pulse. A sunny winter morning turns exceedingly bloody as two evil gnomish creatures bludgeon Ms. Mayer with kiddie tools...right in front of a classroom full of 6 year olds. Time for milk and cookies yet?

6. Friday the 13th

A good deal of this series benefits from those summer days, fitting when the entire concept is based on camping. Since we already know what Jason Voohres looks like by Part III, there’s really no more point in hiding his face in the nighttime shadows (something the misguided remake didn’t seem to understand). All this sunny machete action began in its ‘80s glory with the initial film, where several counselors met their end before they got the chance to put on their pajamas. More notably, the 1980 hallmark of dead teenager movies ends with one of the best jump scares in horror history, when final girl Alice survives into the early morning, only to get a terrifying wake-up call with a dozen and counting sequel potential.

7. The Burning

Yes, George Costanza himself--with hair--handing out condoms to camp counselors intent on seducing underage high schoolers is reason enough see this not-so-good 1981 slasher, but the real highlight is a raft massacre of a dozen kid campers via sharp, rusty garden shears. A great scene of gruesome cruelty and refreshingly timed for all to see.

8. Day of the Dead

Not the best Romero installment by any means (or at least, mine), but it’s hard to argue with those opening five minutes, where scabby, rotting zombies shuffle through an abandoned Florida street on what could otherwise be a fine day for a jog.

9. The Devil’s Rejects

The perfect flip side to the rave-colored black-lit House of 1000 Corpses (look close enough and I’m sure you’ll find some velvety neon posters of wizards hanging on Dr. Satan's walls), Rob Zombie’s matured throwback followup is dripping with the sweaty grime from a hot southern sun. From the daytime hotel massacre and truck scramble to the slow-motion Freebird finale, The Devil’s Rejects makes you feel the heat, one stabbed banjoist at a time.

10. Dawn of the Dead

Zach Snyder's surprisingly spry reimagining of zombies gone shopping smartly avoids the better-in-the-dark style of so many other modern films by opening and closing with two beautifully spring-like sunny days...that just happen to include Olympian trained sprinting undead. Before Johnny Cash's Man Comes Around or Ving Rhames' cool rears its shiny bald head, Dawn of the Dead starts so innocently in a bland, postcard worthy suburb of middle America before waking up the next day to neighborhood shootouts and helicopter crashes. It's fitting that the film ends at its titular time of day as our survivors make their way to a new--probably very short--life sailing a yacht on what would otherwise be an expensive mini vacation.

11. All the Boys Love Mandy Lane

Sure, the bulk of this still unjustly unreleased slasher takes place overnight on a blood-soaked ranch, but its grand finale gets the hot desert morning treatment, making its stunning twist all the more jarring. See it to believe it...when it actually gets legally put into theaters.

12. The Strangers

While the majority of this unofficial Ils remake occurs in the quiet midnight hours, the real horror is saved for sunrise. To avoid spoiling a fairly recent film, I’ll tread softer than the barely audible whispering of star Liv Tyler and simply say that in this surprisingly vicious minimalist slasher, the terror doesn’t end just because it’s time for waffles.

13. 28 Weeks Later

Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later offered a few effective AM shots, but it’s Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s underrated sequel that takes full advantage of the rare British sun with one of the most terrifying opening sequences of recent years. There’s a reason you have to seal yourself indoors in the event of an infected cannibal rampage, and all it takes is one open eyehole to let the chaos destroy any safety you’ve built with fellow survivors. Watching a horde of infected chase after Robert Carlyle, operatic classical music playing maniacally in the background, is enough to make you turn out the lights.

14. The Ruins

Most vacationing college students traveling to Central America want nothing more than to surround themselves with hot people and work on their tans, but that gets taken a little too far in this 2008 adaptation of Scott Smith’s novel. Five fresh-faced young folks find themselves trapped on a mysterious Mayan structure, battling the threat of homicidal vines and--cue the sound cue--each other. While the film’s screaming plants lurk inside darkened caves, most of the more disturbing action occurs under the dry, scorching sun to ill-prepared twentysomethings running low on water and high on tequila. Nearly everything is fully visible, and all of it horrific in a way rarely seen in your typical pretty-people-in-trouble flicks of the 21st century.

15. Carriers

Highly contagious disease is ravaging its way through America--and presumably, the world--but you’d never know it if you just glanced out your window. The gorgeous weather offers an intriguing contrast to the increasingly tense atmosphere of this 2009 thriller as humans die off and plague erodes the line between morality and survival. There’s something disturbing, and yet perfectly fine about nature’s continuance in the face of human obliteration, and Carriers captures it with sunshine to spare.

and a few Honorable Mentions via some fine folks on Twitter

Cabin Fever

The Crazies

Drag Me to Hell

Let the Right One In

Martyrs

Picnic At Hanging Rock

Rosemary’s Baby

plus & Recommendations I Haven’t Seen:

And Soon the Darkness

The Children

Curtains

Dead Snow

Never Mumble To Strangers

As film debuts and studio produced horror goes, Bryan Bertino's The Strangers is a fairly impressive little foray into the much overused home invasion genre. When compared to foreign cinema with similar setups, it's decent.


Quick Plot: A painfully unnecessary and dumbly ambiguous prologue recycled from TCM and The Blair Witch Project opens the film to inform us that a lot of brutal crimes happen in America. In case you can't handle not knowing what kind of film you're about to see, the kindly narrator lets us know that something really bad happened to two people we’re about to meet.

Get it? It's a horror movie. Clear? Let's move on:


Cut to a hauntingly bloody kitchen rotting in the morning sun before heading back to the events of the previous evening. A young couple returns to a lonely country house carrying more melancholy weight than Sarah McLaclahn at a mass puppy funeral. He proposed. She said no. That would spoil most people's nights, but it gets a whole lot worse when a trio of masked psychos decides to break in and spend the next few hours hunting the pretty leads with sharp knives, heavy axes, and a whole lot of stealth.

If all this sounds a bit familiar, then yes, you've seen it before in films like Vacancy, Straw Dogs, Funny Games, Inside, and almost directly, Ils. The Strangers never pretends to tread new territory, which is both its biggest strength and weakness. There are some excellent moments of creepy imagery, slightly unsettling actions, and perfectly timed jump scares early in the film before the masked maniacs are totally unleashed. Where I found that Ils (aka Them) took a little too much time establishing its tense atmosphere before finding its stride, The Strangers succeeds best at creating and building a haunting setup. Unfortunately, once the chase takes center stage, Bertino’s uniquely built tension slips more than Liv Tyler in an overgrown forrest of horror cliches. It's suspenseful enough, but eventually, Bertino runs out of ideas in staging stalking.


High Points
Excellent music choices played on a scratchy LP create an early mood of old-fashioned weirdness

Burlap sacks as masks are naturally scary. Any person willing to subject his or her cheeks to such itchiness must be a true badass


What probably separated The Strangers from a lot of direct-to-DVD horror was Liv Tyler's name, and while she's no Meryl Streep, her and Scott Speedman do make a sympathetic and realistically imperfect couple. The natural awkwardness of their failing romance gives The Strangers an extra layer of character that makes, at least the early scenes before the reveal of what's actually happening, a little more tense

Low Points
I guess James Earl Jones and John Laroquette were too expensive. Hence, the filmmaker grabbed someone with a clear speaking voice, handed him Macauly Culkin's Talkboy purchased on ebay from the set of Home Alone 2, then slowed the speed to create an unimpressively deep and artificial bass to voice the opening

While Tyler and Speedman do a fine job, I can’t imagine whose idea it was to cast two actors known primarily for their quiet and rather inaudible enunciating vocal performances


SPOILER
Like High Tension, I found the opening teaser scene to be unnecessary and unfair. I imagine the filmmaker wanted to compensate for the lack of early bloodshed by hinting at what’s to come, but it takes a lot away from a suspenseful 90 minute 2 character hunt to reveal the final result in the first two minutes


Lessons Learned
Cigarettes will indeed kill you


Wearing masks does little to lower the range of one’s peripheral vision

When proposing, always have a backup plan in the event your intended declines your ring. Otherwise, you not only risk spending a very awkward night drinking champagne for the wrong reasons; you may very well become the prey of mask-wearing quiet people


Rent/Bury/Buy
This is definitely worth one viewing with the lights off, but I don't see it gaining any sort of classic status. There's a lot to admire in Bertino's tense staging and depressingly dark atmosphere, but the effect starts to wear off as the chase scenes physically intensify. A quietly moved cell phone and unseen shadowy figure lurking behind our oblivious heroine is far scarier than the gory sendoff of a minor character. There's not a lot to say about The Strangers, but that's not necessarily a terrible thing. Sometimes, a tight, somewhat predictable but cleanly made little horror is all you really need to keep your DVD player warm and filmic appetite sated.